Posts Tagged ‘GPS’

Ukraine Hits Russian Space Tracking Center

Wednesday, June 26th, 2024

Ukraine has apparently hit a Russian space radar and tracking system in occupied Crimea.

Ukraine has allegedly struck the NIP-16 space communications and tracking facility in Crimea. According to reports, the attack was conducted on Saturday (June 22), using U.S.-made MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) ballistic missiles.

This attack was one of two carried out by Ukraine over the weekend into the Crimean Peninsula. These come just over a month since the United States gave Ukraine the go-ahead to strike into Russian territory using U.S.-made weapons.

The first attack over the weekend targeted the space communications facility with approximately 20 radar dishes. Some of these were combined in large fixtures with eight dishes.

Low-resolution satellite images obtained by the War Zone (TWZ) appears to confirm that the NIP-16 facility was indeed attacked, as claimed. However, due to the image quality, it is difficult to determine the exact extent of the damage.

We’ll get to that in a minute. Snip.

After Russia seized it following the 2014 takeover of Crimea, the facility was handed over to its Aerospace Forces, which then began modernizing it, as reported by the Ukrainian Defense Express (UDE) news outlet.

“As of 2017, reports stated the center had received ten new systems, and the upgrading was still proceeding,” UDE explained. “The initial plan was to spend 1.8 billion rubles on the reconstruction of one radio telescope alone: at the exchange rate of that time, cost about $28 million,” it added.

The Kyiv Post reported that Russia is now using it for ballistic missile early warning, looking towards the Middle East, Africa, and Southwest Asia. Others have postulated that it may be used for GLObalnaya NAvigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema in Russian (GLONASS), Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS).

We’ve got a pretty good idea what was hit because the after satellite photos are already available:

Starting at the top right where the signs of burning are, there’s a pair of laser rangefinders. Moving down around them and in the central area of damage a six meter radom and a five meter radom. And in a bottom bit of damage some items I don’t understand: parabolics on a gimbal, one of them is called, who I’m sure appeared at Glastonbury last year [it’s a radar dish that came move around, like the ones in the Very Large Array]. An M 6 meter case grain [I suspect he means a 6 meter gain antenna], and a 15 meter retractable radar.

Plus “Three new structures which were built since October 2020 the bottom one built in March or April 2021 during Russia’s military buildup.”

OK, let’s talk about GLONASS. According to Wikipedia (the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge), GLONASS has an accuracy range of 4.46–7.38m, which is fine for nuclear weapons, or to track positions of planes and ships, or to hit most buildings, but falls woefully short of tactical battlefield accuracy. During the Desert Storm, U.S. generals would brag that military band GPS would let a cruise missile target an individual M&M in a bowl. Even if we’re limiting Ukrainian access to military band GPS, Civilian GPS + differential GPS (basically using fixed ground tower signals to provide higher accuracy) is probably at least an order of magnitude more accurate than GLONASS.

Differential GPS was something the Russians were going to try to bring online as part of a constellation upgrade, but the Ukraine war (and the sorry state of Roscosmos) might have sidelined that goal. On the other hand, the only scheduled Russian space launches for the rest of this year are all for upgraded GLONASS K1 sats, so maybe that’s the one thing they’re still doing.

Peter Zeihan thinks this move has the Russians way screwed.

  • “You use a deep space system to basically keep track of all your satellites in orbit and communicate among them and to the ground. And since satellites typically are [orbiting], you need several of these stations around the world in order to provide good coverage.”
  • “The Russians have never had that, because the Russians have never had a series of allies that they can trust on a global basis. So they have four of these networks within the Russian Federation and that’s it and apparently one of them was completely destroyed within the last 36 hours.”
  • “It pretty much is the end of the Russian civilian space program. It was already floundering and wasn’t economically viable, especially with the advent of SpaceX because the Russians used to use their old ICBMs as launch vehicles. Basically you use one of them and then it’s gone and then you use another one you keep doing that until they’re all gone and, well, they’re all gone now unless they actually want to go into their active reserve they were using the ones that were decommissioned after the end of the Cold War, so they’re no longer cost effective at all.” I’m not sure that this is true, as all recent Roscosmos space flights have used the Soyuz-2 rocket, whose development split off from ICBM development a long damn time ago.
  • “Second, military satellites. Most military satellites, like most civilian satellites, are whipping around the planet, and now the Russians have lost one quarter of what was left of their capacity to track and communicate with them. That’s going to provide a real problem for the Russians in terms of satellite communications. Not to mention anyone who was looking at getting the Russians to launch and maintain a military satellite for them now has to find someone who is not Russia to maintain it.”
  • “And if your goal was to get away from the United States, there just aren’t a lot of options here, because the Chinese don’t have a good network for this either. So basically you’re down to Europe with the Airbus Consortium or the United States.”
  • “Third and perhaps most significant moving forward is, with the loss of this the Russians are losing the ability to not just keep tabs on their satellites but but to get good telemetry for things like repairs. And if the Russians lose the capacity to do that, then their GLONASS, system which is their equivalent of GPS, starts to fall offline.”
  • “Now there are already parts of the world that don’t have very good coverage all that often, but if you remove meaningful launch capability and monitoring capability and maintenance capability from the Russian system (losing one more radar system would probably do that) then you’re talking about the Russians losing the capacity to use precision guided munitions using geographic tags, that would be an end to things like, say, glide bombs, which are the newest military innovation that the Russians have used, basically dropping one to two to three ton bombs from within Russian territory and then having them glide and hit targets. If you lose their ability for satellite communication that goes away.”

    • I think Zeihan slightly overstates the problem for Russia, or more specifically immanentizes the crisis more than is warranted, especially in relation to the Russo-Ukrainian War. First, GLONASS precision wasn’t exacting to begin with, so its ability to hit tactical battlefield targets was questionable. Second, it takes time for sat global positioning errors to add up, even if you couldn’t use one of the three other stations for measurement and precision correction. Third, Russia hasn’t demonstrated much in the way of precision munitions in this war, the overwhelming majority of their weapons seem “dumb” anyway, and changing that has been made harder by sanctions. Finally, Russia could pull a sneaky end-around and relying on GPS as well as GLONASS for any precision weapons (as many civilian devices, including iPhones, have the capability to use) and the US has evidently retired “Selective Availability” for GPS.

    My suspicion is that the GLONASS damage will be secondary to the destruction of whatever military radar capabilities Russia added to NIP-16, and which were evidently taken out by the strike as more battlespace preparation for the arrival of Ukrainian F-16s in theater later this year.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 5 Comments »

    A Look At Chinese Artillery

    Sunday, October 23rd, 2022

    Here is a moderately in-depth look at China’s current generation of artillery, and how it stacks up to American artillery.

    A lot of this is a fairly detailed order-of-battle breakdown of what and how many artillery pieces are assigned to each level of Chinese military organization, which I’m not going to try to summarize here. But here are some of the more interesting takeaways:

  • China’s artillery mix seems to be between Russia’s “more is more” giant units of towed artillery and America’s largely mobile, increasingly high tech approach.
  • There are different mixes of self-propelled artillery deployed to north Chinese units than south Chinese units. The north emphasizes larger systems, while the south features smaller, more mobile systems for more rugged terrain. (Remember, China got its ass kicked in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979.)
  • Like the U.S., China supports infantry companies and battalions with mortars.
  • Towed artillery is on its way out of the PLA. They’re even using self-propelled artillery in light units that look like six-wheeled technicals, so they can shoot-and-scoot. These look like they could be pretty cost-effective.
  • Like the Russians, China has also gone heavy into unguided rockets.
  • “The Chinese have also adopted a modular pod-based rocket artillery similar to a larger HIMARS, capable of taking different sizes of GPS guided missiles.”
  • U.S. artillery tends to be longer-ranged than equivalent Chinese, especially when it comes to guided shells.
  • Old, big Soviet 152mm and 130mm weapons are being replaced with self-propelled 155mm platforms (PLZ-05, PCL-181).
  • The PHL-03 is an MLRS firing unguided rockets up to 300km.
  • The newer PJL-16 fires unguided 300mm, guided 370mm, and 750mm guided missiles using a pod system. The accuracy range on the guided munitions are reportedly 30m, as opposed to the HIMARS 8m.
  • China has a loading crane system for their advanced MLSR which is better than the Russian system (still loading each tube manually), but not as good as HIMARS self-loading pod system.

    • The high tech Chinese system isn’t as good as the best U.S. systems yet, but they seem to be catching up. However, I wonder how well they can continue to build high tech weapons guidance system under the new semiconductor sanctions. GPS is an old technology, so presumably China build guidance systems in their older fabs guided missiles using their own GPS-like BeiDou system. But the question is whether they can keep even the older fabs running without U.S. support and inputs, and if they can, how high a priority such munitions will be under the new constraints. There are only so many wafer starts to go around…

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    Posted in Crime, Military, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for November 22, 2019

    Friday, November 22nd, 2019

    Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:

  • Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The so-called “Whistleblower” has no statutory right to anonymity.
  • The impeachment farce is boring American voters to sleep. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “Impeachment Inquiry Canceled After 5 Episodes Due To Low Ratings.”
  • How the impeachment farce has actually validated reports of Democrat skullduggery in Ukraine:

    The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:

    • Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
    • Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
    • There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.

    All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
  • “Former FBI lawyer under investigation after allegedly altering document in 2016 Russia probe.”

  • Trump is surging with suburban women, raking in more donations than any of the Democratic candidates.
  • Trump Administration to start enforcing new asylum rules by sending asylum-seekers back to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)

    Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.

    In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.

    Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.

    At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

    The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.

    Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More background on corruption in Muncie.

    Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

    Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • The U.S. just extradited a top Russian cybercriminal from Israel.

    The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.

    On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.

    However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.

    There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.

  • Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • China is stealing our secrets from inside our own government:

    Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.

    Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.

    China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.

  • China’s looming class struggle. As always, the proletariat get screwed by communism…
  • The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
  • The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
  • Snipers kill protestors in Iran.

    The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.

    After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.

  • “Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
  • “Google Is Blacklisting Conservative News Sites, Despite Denials Made Under Oath.”
  • Trump appointment flips the 11th circuit court, which covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
  • Jeffrey Epstein evidently had cameras in every bedroom…and every toilet. Makes the “honeypot for blackmail” idea seem all the more likely…
  • The MSM doesn’t trust you to handle the truth.
  • Woke Charlie’s Angels is the latest box office disaster.
  • “Call us old-fashioned, but we don’t think the chairman of the Homeland Security committee should fly cocaine from the Mexican border into the interior.”
  • How NBA executive Jeff David stole over $13 million from the Sacramento Kings. That amount of money will get people’s attention…(Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Climategate refresher.
  • Heh:

  • Florida Man, meet Wisconsin Man: “Man arrested for 4th OWI, fake license plates made of cardboard beer case.”
  • “Democrat Finally Releases Something Of Substance.”

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Never Mind Sucking Up Tax Dollars: The Latest Democratic Donor Cronyism Could Get You KILLED

    Sunday, December 11th, 2011

    I’m sure by now that everyone who has been paying attention knows the Obama Administration’s insatiable appetite for cony capitalism, especially when it comes to shoveling “green energy” subsidies to Obama campaign donors.

    But never mind that. The latest Obama scandal has the potential to kill more Americans than Fast and Furious, maybe by three or four orders of magnitude.

    The high level summary: A project backed by a prominent Democratic donor might interfere with GPS.

    I used to work at both a GPS company, and a company producing RF chips for commercial computer use, so I have a little more technological background on this issue than some. Here’s a summary of the issue by the former Chief Technology Officer of one of the companies I used to work for:

    LightSquared uses spectrum right next to GPS, and they expect to have both terrestrial and satellite broadband links. GPS signals are already quite faint by the time they reach the earth’s surface, and any adjacent interference could severely impact the performance of a GPS receiver – its location accuracy could be impaired, or it may not work at all. There are millions of GPS receivers in both civilian and military systems that could be impacted…it would be impossible to retrofit all of these with a fix, so the onus is on LightSquared to figure out how to avoid interfering with GPS.

    Here’s another overview:

    GPS satellites broadcast a 50-watt signal from 12,000 miles up, across an entire continent, said Pete Large, a vice president at GPS vendor Trimble Navigation who works with the Coalition. By contrast, the LTE base stations used in the recent tests produced signals of up to 1,600 watts within about a mile of GPS receivers. LightSquared’s signals were stronger by 1 billion times or more, Large said.

    So GPS signals get overwhelmed by a local source. What’s the worst that could happen?

    Well imagine a Boeing 787 Dreamliner conducting an nighttime instrument approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when the GPS signal is overwhelmed at a critical phase. Now imagine that same Boeing 787 Dreamliner plowing into downtown Arlington, Virginia at 150 miles per hour, leaving a wake of bloody body parts and burning jetfuel for a quarter-mile.

    That’s the worst that could happen.

    How likely is that worst case scenario? Well, consider that news just broke of the U.S government test of LightSquared technology. The result?

    – Philip Falcone’s proposed LightSquared Inc. wireless service caused interference to 75 percent of global-positioning system receivers examined in a U.S. government test, according to a draft summary of results.

    The results from testing conducted Oct. 31 to Nov. 4 show that “millions of fielded GPS units are not compatible” with the planned nationwide wholesale service, according to the draft seen by Bloomberg News.

    “LightSquared signals caused harmful interference to majority of GPS receivers tested,” according to the draft prepared for a meeting next week of U.S. officials reviewing the LightSquared proposal. “No additional testing is required to confirm harmful interference exists.”

    (Hat tip: Slashdot.)

    It was bad enough when the Obama Administration was just wasting taxpayer dollars on well-connected business cronies like Solyandra. But Fast and Furious has helped kill hundreds of Mexicans and at least one U.S. border patrol agent, all for the the purpose of promoting gun control. In trying to help another batch of well-connected Democratic cronies at LightSquared, the results could easily be hundreds or evn thousands dead. And it might not just be one airliner, because there’s no guarantee the accident investigation would find the cause quick enough to prevent a re-occurrence.

    Will the Obama Administration back off it’s efforts to ram through LightSquared approval despite the scientific evidence? Will LightSquared stop trying to get the technology approved?

    Don’t bet on it. From the same story:

    LightSquared is “outraged by the illegal leak of incomplete government data,” Harriman said in an e-mailed statement. “This breach attempts to draw an inaccurate conclusion to negatively influence the future of LightSquared and narrowly serve the business interests of the GPS industry.”

    Yeah, the GPS industry does indeed have a strong business interest in not seeing thousands of people die. Whether the the Obama Administration shares that concern enough to turn their back on a major Democratic donor less than a year before the 2012 elections remains to be seen.

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    Posted in Democrats, Obama Scandals | 4 Comments »